


Ashes To The Stars

by Abssynthe



Category: Nightwish, Tarot (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Alternate Universe - Space Opera, Ashes To The Stars, Astronauts, Based on a Tarot song, Environmental Disaster, Finland (Country), Gen, Musical References, References to Other Countries, Spaceflights, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-08
Updated: 2016-08-08
Packaged: 2018-07-28 18:00:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7650946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Abssynthe/pseuds/Abssynthe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>2089, somewhere above the Earth. A lonely man in a lonely spacecraft is enjoying music, beans and sunrise while he is waiting for his companions. Far below him, Humanity is leaving its birth place. Many hindrances still exist - poverty, wars, scroungers, pure madness, but in some of the countries left behind, hope remains.<br/>As Finland is one of these places, six men and one woman are sent to fullfil the dream of a new home for millions of people looking at the Moon and far beyond. Along with his friends, Marco Hietala is one of these musician wayfarers sent in space as the first step towards second chances.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ashes To The Stars

**Author's Note:**

> After working on it for several months, I think this little something is ready for posting. It has been a great challenge for me to finally write a whole text in English, but as soon as I watched the official video of "Ashes to The Stars" by Tarot, I had to make something about it. For now, it is a stand-alone chapter, but I hope I'll have time for additional chapters.
> 
> Please be indulgent, English is not my mother language; I did receive feedbacks for some sentences, but not the entire text has been proofread. Thank you, and I hope you'll enjoy what follows as much as I loved to write it.

The music began slowly at first, eerie, beautiful, quiet... the solitary form in front of the hexagonal shaped glass revealed itself along a soft white light which seems to appear from the outside. He began to stretch, his body gently swaying to and fro as he tilted his head back. A radio hidden somewhere was playing the calming beat filling the entire space of the service module.

Not everything has been correctly fastened, and some loosened objects remained suspended in the air, as if time has almost froze and was struck by some deep idleness. It was like everything there was gradually slowing down. His own silhouette was moving with fluidity and great torpor, since the gravity had lost all power on him. The light, stronger as seconds passed, outlined his figure on the greyish wall. 

Now the world seemed to have stopped somehow. And he didn't want it to move, though he knew that the truth was way different. He wished everything would stop... Pain, joy, sorrow, his journey, the growth of his nails, the cycle of life and death. But the cosmos would just go by, it kept rotating and moving and decaying and recreating, at an almost imperceptible speed for the human mind and point of view. The universe itself was playing an endless game of forms, illusions and reference systems; although one's orbital velocity may be impressively high, the mind would experience sensation of absolute stillness because everything in the world may or may not be in movement when relative to another object. If, at that very moment, he had fixed his gaze on the dark blue planet below him, he would have perceived it one more time. But he already knew what he would see. Everytime the Sun would appear along the seemingly immobile horizon of the Earth, his geostationary spacecraft would be illuminated by the blinding light, and he would stay behind one of the windows of the core capsule, the blue of his eyes melting with the now light blue of his home planet.

But not today. Today, with his baby blues closed, he rather chose to let himself drift and be engulfed by the calm musical flow played by the on-board radio. He understood why so many studies had been carried out about possible psychological backlashes during spaceflight. When a human being was locked by himself, hundreds of thousands of kilometres away from dry land, only surrounded by plain white metal plates, freeze-dried food, in a confined space with clicking, buzzing machines, they have every reason to go mad.

Of course, he missed his family and friends who stayed at the surface of the Earth while he was here beholding the universe. Sometimes he received a message from them, albeit the wrecked long-range communicator of the service module - the mysteries of technology. Their voices kept talking at random, but he was always glad to hear them, as they disappeared without warning. Sometimes, when he was not sleeping, watching outside or eating his breakfast, he took a few minutes to pay attention at them. He never told the others members of the crew about these voices, and maybe they were hearing their own voices too, it was like a taboo or something; he did not know and he did not want to know. In his case, music helped him to overcome the thought of the possibility of insanity.

God, they had been in outer space for five hundred and two days now. Five hundred and two days spent stuck with four others in a goddamn space station – proudly named the _Räikkönen_ by some Estonian engineers. While probably being completely drunk, one of them had found a century-old footage about a race car guy, and decided to name their last-ditch spaceship after him, because " _he’s a Finn just like most part of the crew, the name rocks, and you better have to go pronto like this bloke_ ".

Speaking of the devil, while a few moments ago he could distinguish nothing but darkness through the window, he could see now a tiny lambent spot reflecting sunlight as it was progressively leaving the shelter of the dark side of the Earth. The _Räikkönen_ was approaching, and soon, communication would be re-established between the two spacecrafts for routine controls. Several hours would then pass before communicators went silent again. Once, he had been listening to static noise until the contact finally improved; and it was only to hear one of his friends – one of the boys, but he could not tell who – vocalise his frustration, through the repetitive use of " _perkele_ ". The mystery still had to be resolved.

As for him, it would be the twenty-first terrestrial day he spent alone aboard the ATSM – a lovely acronym for _Auxiliary Travelling Service Module_. He swore to himself that once he was back to the _Räikkönen_ , he would give the little shuttle a better name. She deserved it.

Three weeks. He had been on his own for three weeks. A few days ago had been his children’s birthday, and he had not been able to send them a message like he did last year; the boys had seen him swapping his bass for an acoustic guitar and playing a tune aboard the space station with his space mates making funny faces behind his back; suddenly, the distance between them had shrunk for a few moments. This time, it was merely a short sound recording sent to his family on Earth with the _Räikkönen_ acting as an intermediary. Keeping ties with the people below helped him to find sleep and make him sure that he was not alone, just like when he used to cuddle his children afraid of the dark. Stroking his two-tailed beard, he wondered if his kids could imagine him while looking at the night sky, like the tiny human being he was in all the glory of the universe, brave or fool enough to go messing around the stars.

Ha. He was worrying about his sons although he was the one currently living in a hazardous way. Well, he was not entitled to do anything like jumping in a lake of acid or any obviously lethal activity, but as he was a living organic entity spared from the void only by layers of plastic, metal, circuits, carbon and mathematical equations, the space where his existence would not be terminated was, well, quite small, and incredibly frail in regards of what could happen there.

He would not consider himself a hero – sitting in this flying tin can was part of his job as the senior engineer of the manned _Taikatalvi_ - _II_ mission. He just had to do his job, prepare himself to go on the Moon, turn on the terraforming device left behind by some moron, come back, and tell Finland to get ready and get the spaceships’ engines warm. The Moon, then Mars, period. Not a big deal, really. …Really?

Letting his body drift out of the living quarters, he slowly brushed the white wall with his callused hand, taking the time to feel under his fingers the lifelessness of the material. He moved aside floating earphones, worn out pencils and music sheets full of scribbles. Something collided with his shoulder, and he quickly grabbed the impudent object. Between his fingers was a ridiculous keychain his brother gave to him after he _borrowed_ it on whoever’s desk. He snorted at the little plastic pin-up girl on which some painting was fading out, and put it in his pocket.

As he got into the tube-shaped main corridor, he took a glimpse of his surroundings. Tiny purple lights placed at regular intervals on each side of the passage had been switched on, thus creating an even more peculiar atmosphere. He gripped a strap hanging loosely next to him to leave the corridor in one quick momentum and dashed to his right, forward one of the observation bays of the soon-to-be ex-ATSM, placed on the sides of the spacecraft. As his body slowly reached the window, he eventually touched it first with his hands, then his forehead. The glass panel was so cold that it almost stung his skin, but it also felt good, as it made him remember the winters of Finland.

He often missed them as they inhabited his dreams, with their white beauty, the frosted lakes mirroring the frozen landscape, friends around a blazing campfire by another cold night, the snow between his bare hands. There, the illusion was nearly perfect, save for the blue planet in front of his eyes. From his position, his upper-half was surrounded by a dome made of glass and thin, long plates of metal, the whole structure looking like a translucid flower. He looked in the direction of his hometown, somewhere in the middle of Northern Savonia. He smiled.

" _Good morning, sweethearts. We were here_."

His whisper echoed in the spacecraft until the sound of his deep breath and the soft music still playing were all what remained.

From there, he could see the Earth upside down, and it was a vision that few minds had been granted to see yet. It was like discovering a brand new world. Here the Kola Peninsula, there some former great cities used to shine with urban lights but now forsaken because of the relentless exodus of their inhabitants.

Softly, a voice rose in the capsule - he took him a few seconds to realize it was his. The music player had made a strange hum before starting a new song – a song he used to sing to his twin boys when they were babies. It was a song about endless skies, great god Mars and two travellers passing by, a song about the colourful yet unknown infinity of the universe.

He snapped his eyes open, strangely boosted by such a peaceful melody. He managed to find a ration among all the stuff floating around him, and after pulling open the cap, started to eat what was inside - whatever it might be. It was probably, when taking into account the taste, related with beans. Or something else. For what it mattered, he did not actually really care, and he still had some work to do in the module before his scheduled return to the space station. _Home sweet home._

He pictured himself in that very position - there was something quite grotesque in it. A solitary man absently eating reconstituted beans with a plastic fork, walking in the air and singing along an old school song. His bright blue eyes were scrutinising the rising sun through the windows of a lone spacecraft, his long golden hair waving inside the capsule, while far below him mother Earth was dying.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "The Räikkönen" refers to Kimi Räikkönen, a Finnish car racer with numerous victories in Formula One, and one of the most famous athletes in the world.
> 
> "Perkele" is a quite rude profanity in Finnish language, litteraly meaning "devil", "evil spirit".
> 
> "Taikatalvi", meaning "magic winter", is also the title of a song by Nightwish.


End file.
